War from the Ground Up : Twenty-first-century Combat as Politics

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Deb, Alok Kanti
Copyright Year	2017
Abstract	War from the Ground Up is not easy reading. The author's erudition, bolstered by a wealth of detail and historical context, makes this one of the more serious studies on contemporary military conflict. Emile Simpson has attempted to arrive at an overall understanding of war in its contemporary and traditional forms by drawing on his experience of three tours as an infantry officer with the Royal Gurkha Rifles in Afghanistan. As he explores the myriad complex strands that comprise an insurgency with an analysis of examples from Afghanistan and a number of other countries, he concurrently attempts to relate these findings to other models of war, ranging from ancient times to the Clausewitzan to the hybrid wars of West Asia. He completes his study by examining whether traditional concepts and theories of war and the necessary constructs for its prosecution still find resonance in the present era. Two arguments, listed out in the introduction itself, dominate much of the discourse in the book. The first relates to the traditional use of armed force within a military domain to establish military conditions for a political solution. The second pertains to the use of armed force directly to seek a political outcome (armed politics, as described by the author). Drawing on experience of conditions in Afghanistan, the author explains how what was initially perceived by the West to be a straightforward military contest between two opposing poles—the British Army and the
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Alternate Webpage(s)	https://idsa.in/system/files/jds/jds_11_4_2017_war-from-the-ground-up-twenty-first-century-combat-as-politics.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article